February 8, 2009

I’m writing this because I couldn’t really find anything outside of forum discussions about this, and I thought it might be nice to write up something a little more formal about this.

A friend of mine had an interesting problem with his computer tonight. He had told me earlier in the week that his computer was acting up. I told him I’d take a look at it, assuming when he used the term “acting up” he meant what just about everyone that says their computer is acting up means: it’s running slow. I went over to his house expecting to install a couple of handy cleanup tools I’ve come across and call it a day.

My plans were immediately dashed to pieces when I reached the user login screen. That’s because that’s as far as I could get. Him and the other people he lives with all have separate accounts on the computer (there were 4 accounts total) and none of them would actually log in. I would click on an account and get the usual “logging in…” dialog, then the wallpaper would flash briefly, then it would revert back to the login in screen with a “saving your settings/logging you out…” dialog. Definitely up there with one of the weirdest problems I’ve encountered on a computer (although I never encountered it personally, I would have to say that this has got to take the taco).

Well, it doesn’t take genius to realize that not much can be done to fix a computer from the login screen. Luckily, my friend also had another computer that was working, and I did a little digging around. Based on what I found, it looked like either the registry key regarding userinit.exe or the file itself had been messed with. As I suspected, it was most likely caused by some sort of virus. I found a pretty helpful forum post that had several ways to go about fixing this. The first step is to check the registry to make sure that it hasn’t been messed with:

Reboot your computer. Begin hitting F8, and you’ll eventually come to a screen with a bunch of boot options. Select the very top option that reads “Safe Mode.”

Your computer will boot as normal at this point, and you’ll eventually wind up at the login screen. You should see an “Administrator” user account. Log in under this account.

Go under My Computer, and navigate to the WINDOWS folder. Open the file ‘regedit.exe’

In the navigation on the left hand side, expand the folder ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE’ then expand ‘SOFTWARE’ then expand ‘Windows NT’ then ‘CurrentVersion’ then select the folder ‘Winlogon’

In the list of items in the right pane, double-click the ‘userinit’ property and make sure that the value (bottom text box) is set to ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe,’

If it’s already set to that value, then the file is corrupted and you will need to use the Recovery Console to restore the file. Here’s how to go about doing that (I’ll try to keep this as non-nerd as possible so as not to confuse anyone who may try to use this):

Dig out and dust off your XP disc that you got with your computer (this is probably the most time-consuming step)

Put the disc in and reboot the computer and be sure to access the boot menu at startup (this will be immediately when your computer boots up and shows the manufacturer’s logo. Be on the look out for a message that will tell you what key to press to access the boot menu. It will most like be an F-something key, on Dells it’s F12, I think it’s F10 on HPs. Be sure to be quick too, you only have a few seconds to do this before Windows begins to boot, at which point you will have to wait until you reach the login screen and reboot and try again)

At the boot screen, you will have several options. One of them should be to boot from your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. Select that option and press Enter (you might get another dialog telling you to “press any key to boot from cd…” If this happens, just press Enter again. Please don’t look for the “any” key)

You should get a blue screen. Don’t worry, this isn’t the ill-reputed “Blue Screen of Death,” the disc is just booting up. Once it’s all booted (it’ll take a few minutes, be patient) you’ll get several options. One of them will be to press Enter to begin installation. DO NOT PRESS ENTER! This will begin to reinstall Windows, which you don’t want to do. The next option should read something like “press R to enter recovery console.” This is what you want to do.

Once you do that you’ll be taken to a screen where you’ll be prompted to select a Windows installation based on a list provided. There will probably only be one option, so you should be able to just press ‘1’ and hit Enter. If you have an administrator password for the computer, you’ll prompted to enter that as well.

After that, you should be prompted again. At this point, type in:
/system32/userinit.exe
and then reboot your system.

At this point everything should be working properly. Here are a couple of links that were a big help to me: